What Women Get Backwards About Dating

Dear Republic,

Lots of good dating advice this week! emphasized hotel rooms; expanding your search filters.

-ROL

What Women Get Backwards about Dating

In the early days of the internet, we believed it would connect us to a wider, more diverse world. But on dating apps, we have done the opposite. We have used their power not to expand our possibilities, but to ruthlessly narrow them. We treat filter settings—age, height, job title, distance—as the levers on a precision instrument, a kind of soulmate-manifestation machine. With the decisive click of a “dealbreaker” checkbox to find men ages 29-32, we instruct the algorithm to erect an impenetrable wall against a 33-year-old who might otherwise have been perfect. It’s a form of magical thinking—the belief that the perfect configuration of demographic data will yield a human being as reliably as a SQL query returns a row from a database.

It is a mistake to take profiles too literally and also to take too much offense when they’re wrong. Both men and women misrepresent themselves in online dating. A profile that says “Looking for a Long-Term Relationship” is as meaningful as a five-year-old declaring they want to be an astronaut. The desire may be genuine in the abstract, but it reveals nothing of the maturity, resilience, or specific intention required to achieve it with you. People are curated compositions, and the data they offer is often unreliable. I saw multiple men in 2024 who I remembered from 2014, using the same profile picture minted during the Obama era. One man’s profile listed his age as 39; when questioned, he said he was actually 40, only for me to discover later he was actually 54.

This flawed approach creates a dangerous disconnect: we apply strict filtering on the front-end (the profile) but abandon discernment on the back-end (the human interactions). This is how many people, women in particular, get dating backwards. Overwhelmed by the chaos of too many matches, the instinct is to impose order through demographic narrowing: age 32-35, not 30-38; height 6’0” and above. The goal is to make the winnowing easier. And it works, sort of. The process becomes more manageable, but it leads to a strange paradox. It ends up filtering *for* people who know to lie about their height and shave a few years off their age and hire a pro for their photos and filters *out* the ones who don’t. We find ourselves in excruciatingly hard “situationships,” performing detached coolness to maintain a fragile upper hand and tiptoeing around our need for clarity from a partner who we correctly suspect will dematerialize at the first sign of a real, human demand.

Why does this happen? It’s partly because we confuse our desire for an easy relationship with an easy process to find one. The real failure in dating is clinging for years to the wrong person, not admitting that someone isn’t going to work out.

Feeling frustration is actually the most important and valuable part of early dating: it is the data needed to eliminate a candidate.

We crave a frictionless glide into love because rejection feels bad, and we pretend that stricter filters give us control. But this is an illusion. It leads to dating people who check every checkbox while ignoring the fact they cannot meet our emotional needs.

The solution is to move our focus from the unreliable proxies of profile filters to the undeniable data of human behavior. The real work begins when you stop reading the brochure and start inspecting the goods. The masterclass in character is not in a crafted bio, but in a reaction to a small, politely stated boundary. Saying, “I prefer first dates in my neighborhood,” or, “I don’t like to share my phone number before meeting,” yields more instructive data than their height.

I insisted on video calls before meeting. Certain men expressed contempt at the request. This was actually a good thing, because it helped filter them out. Once on a call, I would get more valuable filtering data: Was there warmth and curiosity? When I spoke about something nerdy, did they seem charmed, or did they take on the polite sheen of a man waiting for his turn to speak?

My own moment of growth was saying “no” to a first date with a man who was, on paper, perfect. He ticked every box. But he was slow to ask me out and displayed a flicker of visible annoyance at a minor boundary I expressed on the call. The old me would have ignored it. The new me understood: this was the only data that mattered.

Conversely, I once accidentally matched with an actor. I wouldn’t normally date an actor, but without a job title field, I didn’t know his profession until we had a great back-and-forth. On the call, I discovered a man of surprising thoughtfulness and intellect who was a terrific conversationalist. I found out after we met that he was financially independent from smart investments from his early role as a series regular. It didn’t work out, but the lesson was still there. The core pillars—character, mutual attraction, consistent effort, stability—are what you are vetting for, and they are often hidden behind the wrong filters.

Of course, this impulse to filter and control doesn’t come from nowhere. Modern dating is straining under real demographic pressures. For college-educated women seeking similarly educated partners, the numbers are brutal. Add to that the growing political divide—young men skewing more conservative while young women move left—and you have a generation where compatibility feels increasingly rare.

But dating is still, at its core, a vulnerable human act. It’s a string of failures until suddenly it isn’t. The real challenge isn’t finding a better app or tighter filters—it’s doing the messy work of actually talking to people and trusting yourself to recognize someone worth knowing, regardless of what their profile says.

Lana Li writes about modern dating through an analytical, data-driven lens on her Substack, Love Me Like a Robot. She is also an e-commerce entrepreneur and marketer. She studied social anthropology at Harvard and lives in Brooklyn, NY with her boyfriend.

Painting by Paul Scaturro